I Found a Note I Had Written and it Made Me Cry

Searching through my computer, I found this… A small note I had written to myself a couple of years ago. Somehow, still relevant today. Why is it still relevant? Why don’t I learn? Why can’t I change the things that bother me? Why, almost 2 years later, am I still paralyzed by fear and inaction? Can I still blame my experiences? Is it possible to just “get beyond” all that has made me who I am today? Is there a point where I give up, and realize that I have stopped living, and that I am just “existing”? That night upsets me still. Here goes:

It is almost 11 PM, and I am getting ready for bed. I am standing in the bathroom, putting on some pajamas, or at least, I call them pajamas. The first set that I put on is a pair of pants that can wrap around me twice. They belonged to my ex-husband- my second, soon to be ex husband. I swiped them out of his things before I knew he was coming to get them. Why would I do such a thing? Well, they looked comfortable. I found one of his old shirts as well. I soon became overwhelmed by the desire to rip them off of my body. They choked me, and strangled me in a way that is incomprehensible considering the size of them, compared to the size of me. I left them in a pile on the bathroom floor, as I searched through the laundry basket to find something else to sleep in. Something appropriate and that would cover me up. I have children, you know. I finally settled on a black t-shirt that I used to wear all the time. I stopped wearing it in the street because it had suddenly started to develop little holes, little tears in the fabric, that soon became too numerous to cover by the way I stand, or hold my arms. Would someone notice a tiny hole in a black t-shirt, if one wore a black tank top underneath? I had hoped not, as I wore it like that most of last summer. As the holes reproduced, and became far too numerous to masquerade as little accidents, that I had not noticed, it was retired to the domain of the sleep shirt. As you can see, I am not one to buy myself much. The “pajamas” that lay on the bathroom floor, still, two days later, are there because I was able to walk on them. That felt good.

The tiny tears of the t-shirt won out over the enormous pants as the tiny tears flowed out of my eyes. It has always been so interesting to me how the words are interchangeable. Tears flow, and tears grow; one a noun, the other a verb. And as I stood in that bathroom, standing on the pants that had me in a stranglehold, I thought about how those tiny tears represented the absolute disregard and neglect of myself. Yet, at the same time, the torn shirt that I had purchased myself, was somehow preferable to the large, stolen pants that once belonged to the man who lied to me, then smacked me across the face.

Why do I still feel as though I don’t quite matter? Why is my own self esteem so caught up in my experiences, that I cannot get beyond them? What can I do to grow from these trials in order to do right for myself. I am caught up in doing right by my children, and by others, yet, somehow for myself, I fail to matter. Coming across those italic words so many months later, I am sitting here wrapped in disappointment at all that I have not learned. Lack of time for “me”? Maybe so, but so sad, nonetheless.